Lipid Leaders: Kevin Williams on Enhancing Lipidomics with SPLASH™ Booster

Posted on March 27, 2025

Kevin Williams Image
  1. Can you tell us a little about your journey in lipidomics and your role at the UCLA Lipidomics Core? What inspired you to specialize in this field?
    My grad school dissertation work was focused on gene regulation in a very traditional molecular biology laboratory. I pivoted to lipid biology and mass spectrometry as a post-doc studying the SREBP transcription factors, the “master regulators” of lipid homeostasis. At that time, there was no lipidomics core at UCLA and I was tasked with setting up assays to measure lipids downstream of SREBP activity. I soon found myself supporting other projects in the lab and collaborating with other labs at UCLA. The UCLA Lipidomics Core developed naturally from that work. I have found it very satisfying to provide resources to other researchers that weren’t there for me during my post-doc.

  2. The UCLA Lipidomics Core is known for its innovative approaches to lipid analysis. How has your team contributed to advancing lipidomics research, and what are some exciting projects you're currently working on? The UCLA Lipidomics Lab is probably best known for the Shotgun Lipidomics Assistant (SLA), which is an open-source application processes data from DMS shotgun lipidomics experiments. We published and open-sourced it on Github in 2021; today it’s used by about 20 laboratories across the Americas and Europe. We’re about to publish a validation of latest expanded acquisition method for the SLA.

  3. You’ve been using individual lipid standards that are now part of Avanti Research’s SPLASH Booster for years. How has having these five additional lipid subclasses (PA, GlcCER, LacCER, DCER, and FFA) in one mix improved your workflow and data quality? I have been adding these five standards to the UltimateSPLASH ONE mix for a few years now. But prior to the release of the SPLASH Booster, four of those standards were only sold as a powder. This required me to resuspend them and aliquot mixes of those standards. As diligent as I am, the SPLASH Booster gives me more consistent quantification across batches. And it’s one less thing that I need to do when preparing standards. 

  4. In what types of lipidomics applications or research projects do you see SPLASH Booster providing the greatest benefit? Within tissue or cultured cell systems, the measurement of PAs often provides insights into the synthesis of other phospholipids and couples nicely with the phospholipid standard coverage provided by UltimateSPLASH ONE. The ceramides and free fatty acid measurements are valuable measurements across a wide variety of sample types.

  5. Standardization and reproducibility are key in lipidomics. How does incorporating SPLASH Booster into your workflows enhance consistency and ensure reliable data generation across experiments? Using just two standard products including SPLASH Booster in my lipidomics assay, especially with experiments consisting of several hundred samples, minimizes batch effects and improves the consistency of quantification.

  6. Lipidomic analysis is becoming increasingly important in understanding complex diseases. How do you see the use of comprehensive standards like SPLASH Booster helping researchers unravel lipid-based mechanisms in disease progression? My standard DMS shotgun lipidomics methods target 1400 lipid species across 17 subclasses and we regularly report out several hundred species depending on the type of sample. Clients often have expectations about which lipids they’re interested in measuring. But doing comprehensive lipidomics give us the opportunity to make unexpected discoveries. For that, comprehensive standards are a must.

  7. For labs considering adding SPLASH Booster to their analytical toolkit, what advice would you offer to ensure optimal performance and data accuracy? My best advice is to prepare standard cocktails and aliquot standards as simply and consistently as possible. Then use controls, like a QC plasma sample to test that consistency.

  8. As lipidomics continues to evolve, what do you see as the next big challenges or opportunities in the field, and how can tools like SPLASH Booster support this progress? I think there are considerable opportunities in isotopic labeling and lipid flux experiments. The development and running of these assays will require standards.

  9. How do you envision future collaborations between academic cores like UCLA and industry partners like Avanti Research driving innovation in lipidomics? I think there’s a kind of “chicken-and-the-egg” dilemma for the development of standards. It’s hard for industry partners to determine if there’s demand for a standard or standard mixes that don’t currently exist. There’s an opportunity within the collaboration we’ve established to advance our research while demonstrating the commercial demand for new products to Avanti. I hope that’s something we can continue in the future.

  10. Looking back on your career so far, what achievement are you most proud of? And what advice would you give to young researchers interested in pursuing a career in lipidomics? I’ve been fortunate to work on so many excellent projects. I am especially proud of the work I did with Professor David Nathanson studying lipidome remodeling associated with CDKN2A deletion in glioblastoma; and possibly in a therapeutically targetable way. They were one of our first clients at the core and the work was published in Cancer Cell in 2023. We analyzed several hundred samples for that paper, including well over 100 primary patient tumors. In terms of advice, I think the best advice I can give is to ask interesting questions.